HP EliteBook Folio ultrabook coming this week, ElitePad 900 tablet early next year

HP is getting ready to launch its first ultrabook aimed at business. I first got a chance to check out the EliteBook Folio 9470m in May, and it’s finally set to launch this Friday when Windows 8 goes on sale for $1049 and up.

The 14 inch ultrabook is a thin and reasonably light laptop with a matte display and a removeable battery.

HP has also revealed that its first Windows 8 tablet for business will go on sale in January… but there’s no word on how much the ElitePad 900 will cost yet.

HP EliteBook Folio 9470m

HP’s business-class ultrabook features a 14 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, an Intel Ivy Bridge processor, 3 USB 3.0 ports, VGA, DisplayPort, and Ethernet. It also has a fingerprint scanner and Smart Card reader as well as a TPM security chip.

The notebook measures 0.75 inches thick and weighs about 3.5 pounds. It has a 52Whr battery that can be repalced. HP will also offer a 60Whr battery slice which you can attach to the bottom of the laptop.

In May, HP said the laptop would get up to 20 hours of run time with the slice battery. I’m not sure if that’s changed now that the computer is expected to ship with Windows 8 (although as a business laptop, you can probably configure it with Windows 7 as well).

The EliteBook Folio 9470m supports up to 16GB of RAM and you’ll be able to configure it with a hard drive or solid state disk.

HP ElitePad 900 tablet

At a glance, the ElitePad 900 looks like a lot of other Windows 8 tablets. It has an 11.6 inch Intel Atom Z2760 Clover Trail processor, 2GB of RAM, and up to 64GB of storage. The tablet weighs 1.5 pounds and measures just over a third of an inch thick.

But HP will offer a series of optional jackets that let you extend the functionality with an extra battery, kick-stand, additional ports, or other features.

The tablet also features a dual digitizer so you can use your fingers or a digital pen. HP chose to give the tablet a 1280 x 800 pixel display, even though some Windows 8 features require 1366 x 768 pixel or higher resolution displays. The company says this will help ensure backward compatibility with older Windows apps — something that could be important to enterprise clients. But it still seems like an odd choice to me.